Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Child's play in China

Part of the reason for dragging my wife and three children half way round the world to live in the high-rise smog of Beijing (aside from the purely selfish motive that, for a journalist, this is the most exciting story on the world beat) was to prepare my children for a world in which, one way or the other, China is going to play a major role.

Already, six months after arriving in China my two elder children (a daughter, aged 3-and-a-half and son, five) are speaking playground Chinese with near-miraculous fluency, a consequence of them attending schools/kindergartens where for at least half the day only Chinese is spoken. (My son takes great pleasure in correcting my own clumsy tones).

Not to put too fine a point on it, I hope that giving them a glimpse of the “competition” will equip them to compete in their century, not mine. I was born in 1972.

I recall my very upper-middle class Edwardian grandfather, who was born in 1900, expressing quiet concern at how hard my generation had to work to get to university and win jobs.

It was as if open competition was something of an embarrassment, a sign of a breakdown in social order rather than a positive sign of a new, emerging social and economic mobility.

A similar protectionist (with a small ‘p’) sentiment, born of a fear of the breakdown of the old world order, is currently detectable in Europe and American today, only it is occurring in a global context.

This is not to say that I look at the Chinese kids in my son’s school, narrow my eyes and view them as the ‘enemy’.

On the contrary, I hope that the language skills and cultural insights that they will gain from living in China will enable them to “co-operate”, just as much as “compete” with their Chinese contemporaries.

This was why last week’s US-China Joint Statement emphasised the need for deeper cross-cultural ties, with America pledging to increase the number of US students in China five-fold in the next four years.

Such ties will be essential if the lofty aspirations of that document are to be met. The rise of China (and India and Brazil) is already putting pressure on resources, jobs and wages in the West and accommodating that pressure is not going to be easy.

This doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, but already you can feel the publics of Europe and America spoiling for a fight – a recent CNN poll found 70pc of Americans view China as an ‘economic threat’ – a hardening of attitudes that is mirrored in the anti-Western nationalism that is a growing force in China.

It is a fight that will do none of us any good, but it will require immense leadership by both China and developed-world nations if it is to be avoided.

Of course giving my children an early glimpse of the ‘competition’ – or should I say their new Chinese siblings in the broadening brotherhood of man – has also thrown up some interesting cultural differences between them and their Chinese contemporaries.

The most obvious of these is the different attitudes to play.

Chinese children are renowned for studying hard (arguably they have no choice as the pyramid is narrow in a country of 1.3bn people) but all the endless study and extra-curricular activities even at primary age means they exhibit visible behavioural differences.

I’ve attended several children’s birthday parties/school events where it was noticeable that the children with Chinese parents were much less extrovert when it came to simple games – things like tag, catch, hide-and-seek, musical chairs or even just plain old ‘boo’.

The children of Chinese parentage – even those of ‘returning’ Chinese – often look completely non-plussed at these games, particularly when adults are involved, chasing children around pretending to be crocodiles/monsters/bears etc.

Perhaps it’s just a cultural difference plain and simple, but for a westerner it is disconcerting – not least, perhaps, because I have a sense that Chinese children are quietly getting ahead while mine are day-dreaming and making daisy-chains.

It may just be that Chinese notions of childhood are different from modern Western ones which have evolved in an era of plenty, and place an emphasis on play and creativity that my late grandfather certainly wouldn’t recognize from his own seen-and-not-heard Edwardian up-bringing.

That said, the Chinese accent on hard work must, at least in part, be cultural not economic, since my son’s Chinese classmates are all the scions of wealthy, professional Chinese. And Indian children, both rich and poor, are visibly more ‘playful’ than Chinese children in my experience.

Does any of this mean anything? I don’t know is the short answer. Jimi Sides, an American teacher writing in today’s Global Times observes the characteristic discipline and conformity of Chinese children translates into a lack of willingness to lead.

“I would say they are a generation not of spoiled offspring, but of followers, not leaders, with little to no motivation to work as a team and accomplish goals in the most effective and timely manner,” he writes of his class of 10-12 year olds.

“Having worked as a teacher for the past year at two different Chinese-run schools, I worry that leadership training appears to be missing from Chinese children’s experience.”

I was also amazed to see a statement from UNICEF marking Universal Children's Day last week, which aims to promote the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which includes ‘the right to play’.

“This is what we usually call the “forgotten right”, because of course adults think the right to play is perhaps a luxury,” said Kirsten Di Martino, Chief of Child Protection at UNICEF China, “They don't realise that this is actually a necessity,”

As a western parent I take some consolation from the expert verdict that play isn’t a ‘luxury’, but somewhere, if I’m honest, is a nagging worry that, in ten years time, when the exam results start to matter and Britain has slipped yet further down the global pecking order, that the Chinese parents might have had it right after all.